3, 4, or 5 year comparison

Until 2017 this feature worked just fine. I'm in restaurant industry and we use the same method. I've been on the phone zillions of times, I've posted on various groups, I even have a special super secret account rep who's told me that yep, Intuit knows about the problem but they don't care. Not enough people are complaining about it. If you were to run your P&L for some dates in 2015 I'll bet you they will work. Try after 2017 and they don't. It's an internal software problem and is reproducible on any company file. I'm on Enterprise Desktop. Don't know if it's like that on the Online version. Totally ridiculous paying THOUSANDS of dollars each year and the workaround is exporting to Excel. Especially when it worked for YEARS and then suddenly doesn't.

3, 4, or 5 year comparison

it's well known you can do a full year comparison (1/1-12/31). and this answer has been given five times already. what QB cannot do is a partial year (YTD for example, or, compare that last five Aprils) comparison across multiple years.

3, 4, or 5 year comparison

I found this by accident the other day... looks like a new feature has been added in the P&L report for "Previous year-to-date (PY YTD)" under the Compare Another Period dropdown. I've only got one year in QBO so far but it looks like it is comparing my 1/1-1/16/2020 data to my 1/1-1/16/2019 data.

Please, for those of you with more years, please confirm this is working as I'm thinking, cause this will be helpful as we go thru the year. If it doesn't work this way, I'll need to find another way.

3, 4, or 5 year comparison

If your Profit & Loss report is totally or partially blank, it may be set to run for this year-to-date or this calendar-year-to-date. If today’s date is January 17th, then the report is only capturing the last 17 days of transactions. Be sure to set the correct date range for your previous fiscal year.